In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

The investigation compared the transparency of 11 different types of symbols with 40 nonspeaking mentally retarded subjects (ages 4-20). Analysis indicated a hierarchy of difficulty with actual objects the easiest and Blissymbols and written words the hardest to understand. Results have implications for selecting initial symbol systems for…

Guidelines for selecting and using pictures to guide instructional decisions and behaviors are based on three areas of research: role of pictures and how they improve learning, how context or environment in which pictures operate can influence usefulness, and how physical and perceptual characteristics of pictures affect their function. (MBR)

High school students (N=213) of various ability levels enrolled in first-year algebra classes were presented lessons concerning geometry concepts. The lessons were varied according to the degree of complexity of the examples that were presented. Students then were tested over their understanding of the concepts. The test questions ranged from…

Students in a college introductory statistics class were evaluated with conceptual and computational tests and the relationship between their levels of knowledge on the two forms of testing was assessed. There were significant correlations between their abilities to perform computations and to answer more conceptual questions on individual tests…

A discussion of the role of the Japanese language in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom in Japan presents several arguments in favor of using Japanese, followed by some notes of caution and a call to teachers to reflect on their classroom language use. Arguments for using students' native language (L1) include these: in mixed level…

The text and accompanying workbook are designed to help second language teachers explore theories of language teaching and learning, deriving a set of hypothesized principles for classroom teaching based on the concept of proficiency and suggesting classroom techniques using them. The first two chapters outline and expand on both theoretical and…